WHAT HAS GOVERNMENT EVER DONE FOR YOU?:

There is a beautifully simple principle at the heart of modern nanotechnology research. Bulk materials become brand-new when miniaturized or restructured at the nanoscale. Their properties change in strange and marvelous ways. For example, a gold nanoparticle is not the shiny yellow color we know from rings and medals; it can exhibit any color of the rainbow depending on size and shape. Through synthetic fine-tuning, chemists have discovered how to make gold prisms, cubes, rods and even more exotic and complex-shaped nanoparticles that can be blue, green, red or purple.

Why does that matter? After all, nanoelectronics were already powering laptops, cameras and other consumer devices by the late 1990s. Chips kept getting smaller and more powerful. (Hence, the endless tales of nanobots gone rogue.) The miniaturization of electronics would have continued without the NNI.

What the NNI did was move nanotechnology into places it had not significantly ventured before, like the medical, chemical, optical and transportation industries. Size-wise, the nanoscale is comparable to biological structures such as proteins, viruses and DNA. This realization has allowed the preparation of unique classes of hybrid nano-bio structures that have fundamentally changed how we study, track and treat disease.

Indeed, some of the most exciting developments of the last two decades pertain to medicine. Many powerful new diagnostic tools have been developed and commercialized based upon nanoparticle probes. Early nanotechnology research was at the foundation of rapid tests that made it possible for schools and society to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the powerful nucleic acid and antigen tests that definitively diagnose disease are based upon nanotechnology platforms. Also, dozens of new nanomedicines, based upon the concept of restructuring drug or vaccine components on the nanoscale to make them more potent or capable of crossing biological barriers, are now in or will be in clinical trials for psoriasis, debilitating cancers, neurological disorders, diseases of the eye and even COVID-19. Specifically, spherical nucleic acids, nanoparticle structures densely modified with short snippets of DNA or RNA, are new forms of the "blueprint of life" that interact with living systems in ways not observed before--ways that allow them to access and penetrate tissues and be used as powerful new genetic medicines. The ultimate components of the biological gene-editing nanomachine CRISPR-Cas9 have been identified, isolated and reconstituted as medicines. Many of these nanomedical tools are highly modular, allowing for rapid development for a variety of different targets.

Moreover, as a new route to inter- or transdisciplinary research, which was at the core of the NNI, nanotechnology has driven a new narrative in STEM: collaboration. Nanotechnology has captured the imagination of a generation of materials scientists, chemists, physicists and biologists to synthesize and understand new materials; as well as inspiring engineers who are trained to develop tools for making and manipulating such structures; and doctors who can use them in the clinic. Collaborative nanotechnology research at our institute unites faculty members from 32 departments across four schools at Northwestern. This diversity of training and perspective does more than broaden the scope of our research. It enables us to identify, understand and address big problems--and it helps us break down barriers between the lab and the marketplace.

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